When fact becomes fiction

There are times when you sit down to talk about the news and there's so much of it that almost any single topic you pick out will suggest a personal bias at the expense of all the rest.

And there are other times – and this is one of them – when there's something so terrifying happening or scandalous that to talk about anything else implies that the talker is frightened or just plain callous. Now this is an old problem for journalists who, as they used to say, write as they please. How could you talk about, say, about California's going into the third year of its severe drought when in Washington DC, the capital of the United States, a hundred hostages were being threatened with decapitation in one building, while in the city's town hall a reporter was killed, a councilman wounded and eight hostages were huddled in fear of their lives. How dare Haslett write that an expert juggler brought tears to his eyes, while in the North of England ten-year-old children were going down the pits for an 18-hour day. 

I got into hot water of this kind, several years ago, with what was then my favourite newspaper by daring to begin a television history of America with a sequence that started with the Indians, then the Spanish conquests and then the roaming and exploring of the French, without saying a word about student riots or Vietnam or the scourge on the land of DDT. Now you might say that, in hindsight, Cortes and Coronado had never heard of Vietnam or DDT, but hindsight is not the favourite weapon of critics looking for a target and it took another twelve weeks for some critics to grant, reluctantly, that I had not overlooked the American sins of our time. 

Well, as I say, this is one of those weeks when, if it was my business to demonstrate at all costs that I am just as compassionate as you, and you, I would have to talk about nothing but the terrorist hold of a day and a night on Washington and, to some people, nothing could be more ominous than Mr Brezhnev's blast at President Carter's defence of Russians who stand up for freedom of expression. Now this has been applauded in private by Western leaders, perhaps they kept their approval private because they guessed, before Mr Carter did, that such a splendid ideological stand might humiliate the Russians sufficiently to imperil the coming talks on limiting nuclear arms. 

But I cannot talk with any intimacy or responsibility about these things because, during the past two weeks, I've been outside the United States, though still in America – to be exact, in Mexico, and just before I flew off there, something happened that throws a bright, but depressing, light on the way we all pick up a true story from one place in a foreign country and immediately spread it to blanket the whole nation, like passing an open drain in a street in Soho and assuming that the whole of London stinks. 

We had planned our own itinerary in Mexico going, in ten days, to four places – to Mexico City to see once again the Museum of Anthropology which must be, with no competition from any other country I know, the most majestic, the most scholarly and thorough and imaginative and most superbly designed museum on earth. Then to an Indian village which speaks no Spanish but only the language of the tribe that settled there thousands of years ago. And then on to Tasco, the tumbling hill town in the south-west that mines silver and fashions it. And, in between, a visit to Oaxaca where you can see the ruins of pyramid cities built by for succeeding Indian cultures. 

Now we had some friends, Californians, who always take their winter holiday in Tasco and they'd agreed to fly north and east to meet us for a tour of Oaxaca. Two days before I left New York, I had a telephone call from Tasco. My friend down there wondered if I'd heard the news. What news? Well, he said, there had been severe riots in the streets of Oaxaca, with students battling the police and gunfire, enough to put anybody off a studious investigation into any other civilisation other than our own. 'So,' my friend said, 'where do you think we should go instead?' I said, 'First, I'd like to get the story straight from a news agency in New York which has reliable men, err... persons, around the world.' Fine. I'd call back. 

I called the world-famous news agency and they said they could see nothing on the ticker about riots in Oaxaca but they'd call their man – and he is a man – in charge in Mexico City and let me know what he knew. Well, it took them about ten minutes to call back and say he'd never heard of any gun battles, any riots, either severe or mild. Well, I... I phoned Tasco again and got my friend back on the line but he insisted the hotels are closed, all except one, which is under police protection. I said I'd check again. This was running into money by now but nothing must stand in the way of purchasing the truth. 

The world-famous agency didn't change its tune. It said all the hotels in Oaxaca were open, no riots, no gunplay, no nothing. So, another call to Tasco. 'Look!' said my friends, 'I hear two people have been shot on the streets in Oaxaca.' And I remembered at once that San Francisco has more random street shootings than any city in America but since my friend is a San Franciscan I thought it would be boorish to bring it up. What I did say was, 'Well, look, last night, two old ladies, sisters, were shot and killed in Riverdale, a New York suburb, and also a girl down on the Lower East Side, but so far they have not closed down Kennedy or La Guardia airports.' This sounded, as it was meant to sound, facetious at 4,000 miles but it turned out to be exactly the point. Anyway, I said that we'd check next day and decide then whether to skip Oaxaca. 

Next morning, I opened the New York Times and felt egg on my face. There was an item – it was small, but it was there – in a column of world news saying that Oaxaca, the city in the province or State of Oaxaca, had had some street disturbances in which students and landless Indians had been battling the police, that the troubles had been going on for ten days and that 12 people were dead. Now this story came from another agency and it certainly suggested that my first source, the world-famous news agency, had been out to a very long lunch. 

However, we found out that no hotels had been closed, that all was calm and, after all, the Mexican airline that flew there every day wasn't likely to despatch a load of tourists into the middle of gun battles. What had happened was that some High School students had burned a bus. There is a small gang that does this about twice a year. The police came out and some youths, unidentified, had guns and, at very long intervals, let them off, very much on the principle of Pancho Villa riding into town and announcing his arrival. So far as I could discover, there were no deaths. A few troops moved in and they were patrolling on odd corners but you could have seen more soldiers in and around Green Park any day than we saw in Oaxaca the three days and nights we were there. 

However, the papers had made enough of it to start a flash flood of rumours that had swept up into the United States and into the tourist agencies and the result was that there appeared to be no more than three or four dozen tourists in the whole city which was a luxury for us and a disaster for the Mexican tourist business, and more of a murky and vague rumour, but a more powerful deterrent, is that the highways and byways of Mexico are now erupting with bandits. In simple fact, there is a small stretch of this very large country that has seen a few Americans seized and searched. What the Mexicans say is that the chances are overwhelming that these people were known or suspected heroin traders for, I regret to say, Mexico is now the chief exporter – illegal exporter – of heroin into the United States. 

So you have a befuddled rumour about severe riots in a town with one burned bus and you have, say, a dozen Americans accosted by the police, less likely by bandits, in one remote part of Mexico and the word sweeps into the United States that Mexico is aflame with gunfire and bouncing with bandits, and the winter tourists stay away in their tens of thousands. It would be as comic as the foreigner's notion that you can't walk around New York City by night if it were not that this staggeringly beautiful country has a staggering economy which so sorely needs the dollars of the neighbour to the north. 

The only American news item I picked up from a Mexican paper in a news-starved week was one about Amy, the Carter's little daughter. It seems that she'd been allowed to sit in on a White House luncheon, not just a family lunch, and was seen on television absolutely at her eight-year-old ease, which is to say playing with the food or leaving it and making faces at the camera. 

Well, by the time I flew to Los Angeles, I saw that this had raised a rumpus among people who expect an eight-year-old president's daughter to develop a presidential mode and behaviour. The Los Angeles Times was bristling with outraged correspondence. She had her dog, Grits, with her, but what will they say when she has a goat roaming around the White House and sells cookies and candy outside the President’s Oval Office? And barges in on Cabinet meetings to sit and fuss on daddy's lap? That hasn't happened yet, not in this administration but it did once before. 

The carefree brat I have in mind was Todd, the son of Abraham Lincoln.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.